Certain organizations, such as credit reporting companies, maintain databases that contain identification, commercial, credit and other information about many individuals and groups around the world or in a particular geographic region. Among other uses of such databases, lists of certain individuals and/or groups fitting certain criteria and/or attributes can be provided and organized as desired for various purposes. One purpose can include marketing. For example, a business user or entity may request information about groups and/or individuals who reside in Atlanta, Ga., and who are in a certain income category, and thus are potentially receptive to a certain marketing campaign.
To obtain data, such as for marketing purposes, the business user often specifies a set of criteria and attributes, as well as desired formats of the responsive data to be delivered, to a credit reporting company that maintains or otherwise can access the databases. Conventional methods and systems often involve considerable manual effort throughout such processes in order to interpret and program the business user's request into an executable computer code or a program which can operate on the relevant databases.
For example, the business user may need to explain the type of information that is needed to a computer programmer associated with the credit reporting company. The computer programmer then writes a mathematical formula or program to perform the analysis and/or functions to execute on the data to be searched in order to return the requested information. Because the data may be stored in an old, large mainframe, the program that is ultimately written may be quite complicated and involved (i.e., not in a language that is recognizable by the business user). Once the program is written, the programmer tests the performance of the code or program against actual or trial data to assure that it will provide the desired data subsets. The manual effort involved in modeling, formatting, and testing programming to return results in desired form, auditing the results, and other aspects of delivering the desired results to the commercial organization can be time consuming and expensive.
An early attempt at creating a computer programming language that includes instruction sets and communication protocols, as well as notations for representing parts of natural language grammars, is the Backus-Naur Form (BNF). BNF is a mechanism that can be used to define grammar, but it is not a grammar itself. Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) is an extension of the basic BNF notation that uses one or more words joined together by hyphens and a normal character representing each operator that has an implied precedence based on its order.
In addition to BNF and EBNF, a business rule management system (BRMS) is a tool that can take the business logic out of procedural code and put it in the hands of business users. BRMS is a way to extract and isolate business rules from control code to allow business users to configure the rules (e.g., for discount pricing, loan interest rates, insurance premiums, and so forth) using if-then-else statements. Examples of such tools are ILOG's JRULES™ and Fair Isaac's “Blaze Advisor.” JRULES™ uses Business Action Language (BAL), which the programmer uses to describe an application's objects, attributes, and methods in the language of the business user. Once a programmer configures the BAL, a graphical user interface allows business users to build rules by selecting pre-determined phrases and logical operators from a tree provided. When the rules are in place and the logic is fixed, variables can be easily changed. This prevents business people from having to explain a business rule to a programmer, who then translates it into Java or other computer language.
One of the challenges that still exists, however, is defining how the plain English version of the rule should appear. In JRULES™ and Blaze Advisor, a user needs to know the language to complete a rule. Although a typical business user could easily explain the concept to be searched using the translation, the business user may be challenged to write the rule in the first form presented.
Other systems have attempted to solve these problems by providing automated criteria and attribute selection by allowing an information requester access to a screen that includes options to “drag and drop” or “point and click” the desired criteria into a search form in order to design their own search. An example of such a system is shown and described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/868,476, titled “Systems and Processes for Automated Criteria and Attribute Generation, Searching, Auditing, and Reporting of Data” filed on Jun. 14, 2004. Words or phrases may be strings that are provided in a tree. The strings in the tree may be limited to those of appropriate type in view of the context provided by the user input. For example, the context provided by the user input may signal the attribute engine to limit the strings in the tree to a numeric value. The tree may be restricted to strings that are the names of JAVA class member types for the class identified by the user input grammar or valid values for the argument type selected by the user. The JAVA class member types may be class n-ary member types, single member types, and not primitive types. The selection of a word or phrase in a tree can cause the abstract tree syntax (AST) of the word or phrase selected to be included in the phrase that is being developed. The user may also assign a word or phrase to a JAVA class. The user defined word or phrase may be included in the tree or able to be directly included in the phrase being developed.
One benefit of such a system is that it allows the business user to actually create his/her own search using terms that are understandable to a business user, rather than the business user having to describe the desired search to a programmer who then creates the search parameters. Although such systems are generally user friendly, they still require a user to know particular formats or languages to implement mathematical functions that may be unnatural to a person with limited to no experience. Moreover, some systems allow business users to identify a type of data on which to search, but do not allow business users to identify statistical measures to use on the identified data.
Accordingly, it is desirable for user-friendly, rules-based systems and methods that can help bridge the gap between programmers and business users. It is also desirable for systems and methods that can allow the business users to understand the language with which their request is being implemented. It is also desirable for systems and methods that can help companies identify instances in which previous rules that were implemented in code are wrong or areas where business logic may be missing entirely.